


BQE Blues

by aurilly



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1990s, Identity Porn, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-10-25 12:05:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10763931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Steve runs away after SHIELD defrosts him... 20 years earlier than in canon. He thinks he's alone, except he isn't, not at all.





	BQE Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trismegistus (Lebateleur)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/gifts).



> Many thanks to Prinzenhasserin for the feedback!

“Hey, wait!” the nurse called when Steve leaped out of the bed. “You shouldn’t—”

But he had already shoved past her and pulled the door open. He paused, baffled. Sure, he was agitated, and sometimes still forgot his own strength, but he was certain he hadn’t pulled it hard enough to make it snap in half, much less to bring the wall down around it. 

What had seemed to be sunlight turned out to be a cleverly calibrated lamp. What had seemed to be a hospital room turned out to be a stage set. What had seemed to be a nurse turned out to be some sort of actress.

Well, he thought, as he broke into a barreling dash towards what looked like an exit, what must have seemed to them like a helpless patient turned out to be anything but. 

Steve had no idea how he’d gotten here (the last thing he remembered was crashing, way out in the Atlantic), but he sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around long enough to find out. This place reeked of more fakery than a Tammany Hall politician kissing a baby. 

The machine gun-toting soldiers mobilizing around him didn’t give him a great feeling either.

It wasn’t just the rooms and people that were wrong. It was _everything_ , every meaningless detail. Steve shoved his way past at least two soldiers whose hair was longer in the back than the front would suggest. Loud beeps and unnatural snicks added to his overall confusion—and his desire to get as far away from here as possible. The only other place he’d ever felt kind of this bone-deep disturbance was in his first Hydra facility.

When he crashed his way through the front door and onto the street, the glass shattered into a million little balls instead of leaving jagged edges. What the hell kind of glass did that?, he asked himself. But he barely had time to marvel at this before he was hit with a sight out of his nightmares. It looked like New York, but a New York that had undergone a partial ‘Metropolis’-style redesign. There was Macy’s, sure, but the rest of Herald Square contained elements at odds with what should have been a familiar scene. The cars looked strange—flatter, boxier, flimsier. A few new buildings had sprung up; detail-free glass boxes suggesting an imagination that had taken a lunch break midway through creation, and never come back. 

But even more startling was the lack of hats. Steve had never before seen such a sea of uncovered heads. Under normal circumstances, he would have stuck out without one, but in this case, at least, the wrongness of everything worked in his favor. A year spent wearing a unitard of primary colors had left Steve out of practice in the art of blending in, but he’d never forgotten the feeling of his former stature, what it felt like to be small and invisible. He hunched low and barreled his way through the crowd, ignoring the indignant “hey”s and pissed-off “watch where you’re goin’, bud”s of the people he jostled. High heels and dress shoes trod on his bare toes. 

When he’d made it a few blocks, practically to Times Square, Steve stopped weaving just long enough to spare a glance at the wares of a newsstand. Magazine covers featuring shockingly naked women lay spread along the lower shelf, just below the gum. The _Sun_ had always been Steve’s paper, but today it was the _Post_ ‘s headline that caught his eye.

 _Long Island Lolita_  
17-year-old high schooler arrested in attempted murder of lover’s wife

The last time Steve had seen an American paper, the front page had been covered with war stories, politics. Real news. This high schooler must have been important in some way, or perhaps the lover was a politico.

Steve had already paused to read the headline, but what made him stop fully was the smaller print—the date on the top of the page. 

1992.

_1992?_

Like a Looney Tunes scene where the same word jumped out in all sizes and covered the screen, all Steve could see as he scanned the rest of the publications was that number.

“If you wanna read something, you gotta pay for it,” the proprietor of the booth snarled.

Steve didn’t have any cash, so he scrammed, per the implied request. Unless the lay of the land had changed in this funhouse, there ought to have been a BMT entrance at the end of the block. Sure enough, there it was, even though the signage and structure around the entryway had changed. Steve wandered through the labyrinth of tunnels until he found himself, not in the subway, as he’d hoped, but in a bus terminal.

There had never been a bus terminal here, and certainly not one of this scale.

Steve could hear the stomp of booted soldiers approaching behind him, but knew better than to look back. He decided to try a ploy Bucky had once described, about a mission where he and another sniper had needed to slip into an occupied village, with spooks on their asses. Steve collapsed onto the floor beside one of the many hoboes lounging along the edges of the hallway. He hugged his knees into his chest and snuggled close behind the cardboard sign at their feet.

“Hey, what the fuck do you…” The man smelled as ripe as the Gowanus Canal on a July day. He tried to shove Steve away with a dramatic and disjointed bristle.

“It’s all right. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.” Steve grasped the filthy blanket spread over the man’s legs and pulled it over himself. “I only need a minute and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Go fuck yourself.” The man tried to grab the blanket back, but Steve’s grip was too strong to put up a fight without ripping the thin wool.

Their bickering actually helped Steve overcome his too-clean look and fit in with the mumbling, twitching homeless around him. One by one, the soldiers passed within a foot of them, never even looking down. As they did, Steve checked out the weapons that they were trying to hide under their trench coats—almost as poor attempt at blending in as the spies of Operation Pastorius.

Operation… Steve’s heart clenched. The war. What if they’d lost? What if the reason they weren’t attempting to hide was because they didn’t have to? What if this nightmare was actually…

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Eat shit,” the hobo said.

With dogged politeness, Steve continued, “Who won the war?”

“The war ain’t never ended.”

“What?!”

“It ain’t never gonna end. Fuckin’ rats and roaches and the Man.” Then, as a complete non-sequitur (if the previous sentences could count as a topic), he looked Steve square in the eye and asked, “Yo, you got any chronic?” 

“Why do you ask? Do you have one, too?” Steve wondered if his old illnesses still showed somehow, if people could smell it on him, smell that this body was a fake. He glanced down at himself to ensure he was still serum-sized. In this strange not-dream, anything was possible.

Instead of responding, the man began mumbling to himself in a rhythm too specific for normal speech, but not musical enough for song. “Well, I'm peepin' and I'm creepin' and I'm creepin'. But I damn near got caught ‘cause my beeper kept beepin'.”

Perhaps this guy wasn’t the ideal source of information.

Not knowing what chronic was (but also not having a good feeling about it), Steve changed the subject. “Is there anything I can help you with? Food? Water?”

“How you got money to buy me food? You ain’t even got money for _shoes_.” 

“You come here most days? Is this your spot?” 

The man shrugged and went back to his odd, scat-like recitation. “Is where it takes place, so when asked, your attention. Mobbin' like a motherfucker, but I ain't lynchin'.”

The danger seemed to have passed, but Steve’s goal was to throw them off his scent for keeps. He shook the hobo’s limp hand, promised to be back one day, and slipped into the crowd again. 

A wave of people carried him onto an arriving E train. Even the train cars looked different, a kind of rusted silver color on the outside with peeling beige paint on the inside, and they were even more stiflingly hot than he remembered. He squeezed between a large man and a small child to sit at the far end of the car, tucking his feet as far under him as he could. Someone had left a crumpled and coffee-stained copy of the _Times_ on the seat. Steve pulled it out from under him as he sat down. 

The contents of this newspaper could have doubled as an issue of one of Bucky’s old science-fiction newsletters, but Steve devoured every word. A ‘Lolita’, he pieced together, was a term for a little girl who seduced an older man. An important-sounding war against Russia had recently ended, but in whose favor, or where it had been fought, Steve couldn’t make out; however, given that it had been dubbed the “Cold” one, his first guess was Siberia. And now there was a very hot-sounding Gulf War, but Steve tease out the motivation for fighting it. 

The war Steve had fought in must have been won in Allied favor, because the only mentions of Japanese supremacy he found were in the business section, and there was a small column on protests against Neo-Nazis in Berlin. The ‘neo’ struck him more than anything else, and reinforced his growing suspicion that this was no nightmare. That the serum had allowed him to Rip Van Winkle himself fifty years into the future. 

The ramifications of what that meant—for himself and for the people he’d loved, for his place in a world into which he’d never quite fit—held too many painful potentials to dwell on at this moment. Adrenaline had kicked in when he’d needed it, back in Herald Square, but whoever had found him had been right to monitor him. Tiredness was starting to come over him again, and a cold stiffness had begun creeping up from his toes to his calves. He needed to walk, run, warm himself up again. Ideally, find something to eat.

Light suffused the car as the train climbed to an elevated track. Looking up and between the shoulders of the strap hangers (the straps were now made of metal, he noted, and they looked uncomfortable to hold, jerking back and forth with the motions of the train), he saw that they had crossed into Queens. The crowd thinned as passengers exited to make a connection. The remaining ones began to shoot quizzical and judgmental looks at Steve’s feet, and then up to appraise his body, before averting their eyes. 

This universal fear of eye contact was something Steve had never experienced before, not even here, in New York. What was the point of having won the war if everyone had come out of it even more afraid than they’d been? What had happened in the past fifty years? Because at this point, Steve no longer thought he was dreaming. The sting on his foot from where he’d stepped on a needle hurt just enough convince him.

He got out at the next stop. While descending the stairs to the street level, he took in his surroundings. He heard at least three different languages as he stumbled down the block, trying to look more purposeful in his progress than he truly felt. He noted all the strange things he saw, but their sheer number was too overwhelming to register any individual one. He veered off the main drag and onto a quieter avenue, where there were fewer pedestrians, and fewer people to notice him.

However, fewer people to look askance at him correlated with fewer people to look out for one another. In the darkening evening light, he spotted a skinny old man with a long stick. The man headed under a darkened overpass where four youths with enormously baggy pants lay in wait. 

Steve had been that little guy often enough to see what was coming. However, this was the first time since getting the serum that he’d had a chance to help someone in this kind of trouble, regular civilian trouble. To do what Bucky had always done for him. For the first time in this strange afternoon, Steve felt entirely certain of what he was supposed to do. 

He dashed down the street, cutting himself even more deeply on yet more broken glass, but even with super-strength, he still didn’t arrive soon enough to pre-empt violence entirely. The youths had already grabbed the old man’s jacket sharply enough to throw him off balance. As soon as he’d gone down, they started hitting him in the sides and laughing. There was something off about the old man’s wild flailing. From the way he swung his long red and white stick, Steve soon guessed he was blind. 

The fight didn’t last more than a few seconds after Steve’s arrival. He grabbed two of the boys by the ear, one in each hand, and hard enough to elicit squeaking gasps from these tough-guy wannabes. The faces of other two went splat against the pavement after a well-timed trip.

It all happened so fast that the old man couldn’t tell that he’d been rescued. He continued to swing his stick, hitting Steve squarely in the stomach.

“I’m here to help, sir,” Steve said.

“How am I supposed to know?” The man hit him again, whether for good measure or out of spleen, it was hard to tell.

The boys were in the process of getting up, but one look at Steve’s serious face and imposing size had them scrambling to get away.

“Did they take anything of yours?” Steve asked the man as he helped him to his feet. “They’re running now, but I can catch them if you need something back.”

“No, I can take care of myself.”

Steve smiled, because he recognized that irritable tone as the one he’d used for most of his life.

“I’m sure you can. But in the meanwhile, can I walk you somewhere?”

The man felt around until he found Steve’s hand. Exploring slowly, he fingered his way up, up to Steve’s elbow, whistling as he squeezed Steve’s bicep. 

“No, you’re not one of that gang. Everybody knows those kids. They’re from a couple of neighborhoods over. Skinny twerps. You… you’re something else. Military-grade.”

Steve laughed. “You’re not wrong, sir.”

“Where’d you serve?”

“It was, er, classified,” Steve said, hoping that response would land in this unpredictable future. 

Apparently it did land, because the man gave him a thoughtful grunt, and simply said, “Special Forces, huh? Well, you look it. Or, feel it, would be more accurate. You sound like it, too. You got some real steel in you, son. You could always tell when Special Forces was around, just by the way they talked. What was your rank?” 

“Captain.”

The man whistled. “Guess I should be calling _you_ ‘sir’. I was only a Sergeant.”

“My best friend was a Sergeant. I wouldn’t say there was anything ‘only’ about it. Hardest job in the unit, I always said.”

“You’re not wrong about that.”

“Where did you serve?” Steve asked.

“Spent most of my time in France. ‘43-44. 78th division. Honorably discharged after walking on a land mine. Left me like this.”

Steve knew better than to show any pity. “Well, you’re a credit to your country.”

“Damn right I am.” The honest flattery seemed to have put him at ease, because the man finally lowered his stick. “Well, I’ve got a feeling those kids won’t be bothering me again any time soon. You new here?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Steve said, with more honesty than he probably should have. But this old man gave him a good feeling, was the first thing since waking up that felt in any way right, in as much as an old man that Steve had performed for during those last weeks (and he must have, because the 78th division had stuck out in his memory as awful hecklers) could be ‘right’. “I grew up in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn, eh?” the man said. “Well, I won’t hold it against you. You planning on sticking around?”

“I’ve got nowhere else to go.” 

“No shame in that. What’s your name, son?”

“Steve. Uh. Grant,” he said, deciding in an instant that, until he got a better understanding of who had found him and what they’d wanted, he should continue to stay incognito.

“Ken Mortenson.”

“Nice to meet you, Ken.”

While they’d been chatting, Ken had continued lazily exploring Steve with his stick, and was now poking at his ankles. 

“What happened to your shoes? Army captains as well brought up as you are don’t usually run around barefoot.”

“I… guess I lost them. I don’t remember how.”

“Memory loss, huh?”

“Of a sort, sir. It feels more like lost time.” 

“You’re not the first vet to describe it like that. You just been discharged?”

That was one way of looking at it. Steve had been so busy escaping captivity that he hadn’t yet stopped to think about the fact that he was a free man now, his own man, a civilian again. “Yeah. I don’t… I don’t really remember how I got back, to be honest.”

“You got any family? Friends?”

“All dead.” Steve was thinking of Bucky as he said it, but it was probably even truer than he knew, given that the war had continued and fifty years had passed.

“And no money, I’m guessing?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Steve said proudly, already irritated with himself for his helplessness, even more dire than when he’d been a sickly weakling.

Ken snorted and muttered to himself, “Offering to help me, and can’t even take care of himself. Acting like he’s the only vet fallen on hard times. Still, it’s better than most kids today.” Louder, he said, pinching Steve’s arm as though he were a recalcitrant little boy being trundled off to bed, “Come on. There’s a Modell’s down the block. My buddy’s nephew runs the joint. We’ll get you fixed up.”

* * *

**One Year Later**

 

It didn’t hurt him or anything, and yes, the bar _was_ overcrowded, but the smug asshole standing behind Steve seemed wholly unrepentant about elbowing him in the ribs, over and over again. The hostess came by not a moment too soon to tell Steve that his table was ready.

He nodded at his date, and wove his way through other waiting patrons, just as he’d woven through the Herald Square crowds the day he’d woken up. That had been almost a year ago, but Steve felt as though he’d never stopped weaving, would never get somewhere quiet, home. 

“They really went all out on giving us the best table, didn’t they?” Elaine’s lower lip curled in disdain even when Steve took the less desirable seat of their inconveniently placed two-top, facing the bathroom door. “You could say something, you know.”

“I’ve had worse views,” Steve said absently. He cringed at himself when he heard his own words, and hoped she would interpret the comment as a compliment.

From her quizzical expression, he could see that she had not. They both glanced at the family sitting at the big table beside them. They were all speaking loudly and sharing a giant serving platter of Bolognese. Where Elaine scowled, Steve smiled. They looked messy and happy. Real.

This was Steve’s first date since waking up in the future. And so far, it wasn’t going much better than the ones Bucky had used to set up for him. This pretty paralegal, who’d seemed bowled over when Steve had introduced himself at the bar twenty minutes ago, now seemed bored. So much for his new body; it still didn’t make up for an inability to talk to women. 

Though, maybe his problem wasn’t so much inability as indifference. Not just to this women, but to everything. 

“My aunt Ruth won’t shut up about what a great guy you are,” Elaine said after she’d ordered wine for both of them, Steve not having an opinion. “But she hasn’t told me what you do, exactly.”

She’d already explained, in great and excitable detail, that she was a paralegal in a big midtown law firm, and had a nice apartment near here (the invitation for later was implicit). Too bad that Carmine’s bar area was too loud to have heard any of the other details she’d shared, super-hearing and all. Now that they were sitting down, Steve was able to make at least a half-hearted effort.

“I do a bunch of different things,” he said. “Security, mostly. Some construction work here and there.”

“How’d you get into that?”

“One of your aunt’s neighbors. I ended up in their neighborhood after I left the army. Everyone on the block has been really kind to me, and took me in when I had nowhere else to go. Called in a few favors to get me started. Now, I don’t need the help anymore. I get my own calls, more than I know what to do with, some weeks.”

First through Ken’s spider network of connections, and then on his own steam once he’d built up a resume of sorts, Steve had kept himself busy with a variety of security jobs. His specialty, which had emerged after only a few weeks at it, was for high-end jobs, where his apparently rare combination of his imposing stature and clean-cut looks were exactly what the proprietors wanted.

He left out the part about how the papers that someone’s disreputable Staten Island cousin had procured for him wouldn’t have withstood an in-depth background check. He left out the part about how people who technically didn’t exist—ghosts who’d died fifty years ago—didn’t have a lot of options.

But security was just posing, even worse than the USO tour had been, because there was no way to convince himself that he was helping anyone. Sure, he was the only bouncer who spared a hand to steady the too-drunk girls who toppled over their high heels, and he’d broken up a fair number of fights that might have turned violent without intervention, but Steve had always dreamed of greater. Even before, he’d been dissatisfied. The only thing that had ever fired him up had been the war. And now… 

Ken kept telling him he’d be no good to anyone if he wasn’t good to himself first. It was advice reminiscent of some that Bucky had always given him, and just like back then, Steve resisted it.

“Do you like it? Security and construction?” Elaine asked.

Steve could hear in her tone what the right answer ought to be. He could hear that he was a disappointment, but he didn’t have it in him to put a spin on it. He was disappointed in himself, too. 

“Not really,” he admitted. 

“What do you want to do instead?” she asked next, seeming relieved to hear that at least he wasn’t satisfied with this, that he wanted more.

And wasn’t this the million-dollar question, the one Steve avoided every single day. “I’m figuring it out,” he lied, unconvincingly.

Elaine frowned again, and turned her attention to the menu. 

With her big brown eyes and button nose, this girl was every bit as sexy and smart and successful as he’d been promised. But he wanted desperately to leave. 

He let her lead the conversation for the rest of dinner, paid like a gentleman, and walked her the ten blocks to her apartment on Columbus.

“You wanna come up for a cup of coffee?” she asked, giving him the same hungry once-over she’d given her tiramisu a few minutes before. But her gaze was solely lustful; they both knew that there would be no pillow talk, not when they’d struggled all evening to make conversation.

Once upon a time, Steve had longed to be wanted like this, but now, he hated _only_ being wanted for this.

“If I drink coffee at this hour, I’ll never fall asleep,” he lied, before bidding her a polite goodnight with a kiss on the cheek.

After a long subway ride made even longer by an unannounced weekend service change, Steve dragged himself down his quiet Astoria street. At 11PM, all of his elderly neighbors had long ago gone to bed.

He let himself into the little alley passageway between two houses and tiptoed up the outdoor stairs. Ever since he’d started making enough to pay his own keep, he’d been living in one of Ken’s next-door neighbors’ attic. The situation worked out well for everyone: Steve got an inexpensive place to live, and Mrs. Demapolous got a human garbage disposal for the mountains of moussaka and spanakopita she insisted on cooking every week. Steve had become a sort of live-in superintendent for the block, repairing most of the leaky pipes and busted gutters that otherwise would have cost these proud seniors an arm and a leg. 

He thought of what Bucky might say about his life now.

“You’ve got it made,” the voice said in his head, cheerful and exasperated. “Ten sets of grandparents who love you and find you pretty girls to go out with. Jobs that let you set your own hours. No suit and tie, no desk to tie you down. What’s the problem?”

The problem was that Bucky wasn’t here. The problem was that Steve felt as though he hadn’t woken up, was still sleeping, frozen somewhere in the Arctic.

As he’d done every night for the past few months, Steve reached under his bed and pulled the H volume he’d borrowed from Ken’s set of encyclopedias months ago. He’d visited the same section so many times that the book practically fell open on the desired page. With the same amount of longing as every other night, he stared at a photo of himself with Bucky. He ran his finger around the edges of the photo, never over it.

Bucky must not have known anyone was taking a picture, because his face was stamped with the dead-looking expression he’d taken to wearing when he didn’t think anyone was looking. Steve wished tonight, as had every time he’d spotted it in the flesh… He wished he could kiss it away. 

But he’d never said anything before, and now Bucky was dead, and he’d never be able to say anything.

* * *

“How did the date go?” Esther asked. 

“I don’t think it’s going to work out,” Steve said between shovels of his third helping of stir fry.

Steve’s Sunday night dinners with Ken and his wife had become one of the pleasant staples of Steve’s life. Here, in the small, doily-covered dining room, and with people who’d grown up at the same time he had, he almost felt as though he was back at home. 

“Not much of a loss. I hear she’s a fast girl,” Ken said.

“Ken!” Esther squeaked, embarrassed as usual by her husband. Turning to Steve, she chided, “According to Ruth, you barely tried.”

Steve supposed it was a fair statement. “We didn’t have a lot in common. Not a lot of shared life experiences.”

“You’re gonna have a hard time finding a girl who was in Special Forces,” Ken said.

Steve swallowed the truth that had been gaining quiet confidence in recent weeks—that maybe he didn’t necessarily want a girl. While it wasn’t the kind of reply he felt comfortable giving Ken and Esther—who were people of his era, if not his age—times had changed enough that he could have said it to other, younger, friends, if only he’d had any. 

“We just want you to be happy, dear,” Esther said. “You go around with those sad eyes and that long face and it just breaks my heart.”

“I’ve been thinking… Maybe what I need is a change.” 

“You only just moved here,” Ken said. “That wasn’t change enough for you?”

“I think I want to go out West. Just for a visit. I’ve never been. I used to have this dream… Drive across the country, end up in Hollywood,” Steve explained. 

What he didn’t say was that the dream had originated in Bucky’s imagination. They’d sit on the fire escape and Bucky would draw pictures in the air with his hands, eyes shining as he planned out their future. A future in which Steve would design the sets for Fred Astaire to dance in, and Bucky would help build them.

“Until someone notices you and puts you in front of the camera,” Steve had always said.

At which Bucky would tuck his head into his shoulder and shrug it off with an “I’m not good looking enough… Well, maybe my hair is, but…”

“Well, why don’t you take a trip?” Esther said. “There’s no reason you can’t take a vacation if you want one. We’ll get by for a couple of weeks without you.”

“I need to save up more first. I don’t even have a car.”

“You can get a used one pretty cheap. I know a guy.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Steve repressed a smile, because it was true; Ken knew tons of ‘guys’, very useful ones. But…

“I don’t want just any car,” he said, still lost in the memory. “I want… It’s stupid.”

“What?” Esther said.

If he was going to give into his nostalgia, Steve figured, he might as well give into all of it. “It wouldn’t be the same with a new car. I always pictured doing it in an old one.”

“You could borrow my old Volvo. I’m not driving it much these days, not with my knee the way it is.”

“That thing’s from the 70s,” Steve said, wrinkling his nose.

“Isn’t that old enough?” Ken asked. 

“I was thinking of something else. From the 40s.”

“You want some sort of antique piece? You only see those in museums,” Esther said.

Ken leaned back in his chair and rubbed his belly, as he always did when he was not only full, but also plotting.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Luis has a car from the 40s.”

“Luis who lives around the corner, Luis?” Steve asked. Luis owned the greengrocer where Steve got his staggeringly large weekly orders of produce filled. He talked Steve’s ear off every week about everything under the sun, but apparently they hadn’t yet gotten on the subject of cars.

“Yeah. He bought it off somebody, probably thirty years ago. Used to ride the damn thing across the GW Bridge and into Jersey. But it broke down awhile back, and he’s been too sick to do anything with it. He can’t stand the idea of giving it to the junkyard, and he’s never found anybody to sell it to. Just keeps it in a garage over on 21st Street.”

“Do you know what kind of car it is?”

“A 1942 Packard.”

Steve’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking.”

“What?”

“That’s exactly the car we… I mean, that I used to dream about.”

“Let’s go over there and ask him about it. I could use the walk, after all that food.”

Esther rolled her eyes. “You boys go along. I’ll clean up.”

A little more than an hour later, it was all set. Steve’s wide-eyed appreciation of the car made Luis’s year. Moreover, it was making his wife’s.

“Just take it, Steve. It’s the least we can do to thank you for all the weeding you’ve done in your yard. Anything to get that hunk of junk gone for good. I’m sick of paying garage bills every month, for a car he’s never going to drive again.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Luis said. “You pay to have her fixed up, and I’ll give her to you for free. I just want to see somebody drive her again, that’s all.”

“There have got to be vintage repair shops around here, right?” Steve asked. 

“Look it up,” Ken said. “I’ll ask around, too.”

Fueled with new purpose, Steve spent more time with the Yellow Pages that night than with the encyclopedia. He searched, but nothing specific to vintage cars came up. 

The next day, he visited a used car dealer, hoping they might have a rec.

“Hey, do you know where I could find someone who fixes antique stuff?” he asked before the guy could start selling him something. “Old cars and bikes, from the forties. For example.”

The boss told Steve to fuck off, but one of the assistants must have been an enthusiast, because he sidled up to Steve on his way out and handed him a scrap of paper.

“My uncle got a vintage Mercedes repaired here last month. They’ve been there for years, nothin’ doin’, but apparently they got a new guy who has a way with old models. Even gets calls to work on cars for the movies, they say. Magic hands, they say.”

“Where’s this?” Steve asked, looking down at the unfamiliar street name.

“Kinda around Brighton Beach? I don’t really know Brooklyn. It’s a trek, but my uncle and his buddies swear by this place. And they’re all car hounds. They know what they’re talking about. ‘You don’t see work like this no more’ he says to me. And he never says that about nothin’.”

“All right,” Steve replied. “Thanks. I’ve been looking for an excuse to go down that way anyway.”

* * *

Getting to the ass-end of Brooklyn had always been a trek. Today, coming from Queens, the rumbling ride took over an hour longer, not even counting the sick passenger that had held up the works. As he descended the stairs from the El platform, Steve took in the changed neighborhood. If anything, the area had become even more full of Europeans. The first three people he asked for directions spoke English with too thick of an accent for him to understand.

During his lost wandering, he entered a block-sized park. A group of old men gathered around concrete tables painted with chess and backgammon boards. They gossiped over their death-matches, not unlike Ken and his pals in a similar park in Queens. 

“Excuse me,” he said, and then switched over to Russian to garble out what he hoped was, “I’m looking for a mechanic. Koslovsky.” The request used two of the five words he’d picked up from the Russians who’d been stationed with them near Strasbourg. 

Before any of them could answer, a shrill female voice piped up. “You looking for Jimmy?” she asked in English.

“I... I don’t know,” Steve said helplessly.

Seeing that this woman had taken Steve’s case, the men went back to their game.

“You’ve got a look about you. Like my beau from when I was young. Same way about him. Jimmy has the same way about him, too, sometimes. You a friend of his?” she asked, with hopeful wistfulness.

“I’m looking for someone named Koslovsky. A friend of mine has an old car that needs work, and I got a tip that he’s the best.”

“You’re looking for the right place. But it isn’t Koslovsky himself you want. It’s a guy who works for him. Jimmy. Showed up around here one day. Koslovsky’s ma made him take him on, just to help him out. But now Jimmy’s turned the place around. Helpful around the neighborhood, too.”

This was all very well, a familiar story, even, but Steve wasn’t here for Brighton Beach gossip. “I have an address, but I don’t…”

“I’m heading in that direction. Wouldn’t mind some handsome company.”

She was frailer than her voice suggested, and must have really needed the arm. Steve gently took her elbow and helped steady her at her walker. Together, they made their way out the other side of the park and down a bustling street of kosher delis, produce markets, knick-knack shops, 99-cent stores, and a Famous Ray’s. All the while, Steve’s new friend (Rose Schlossberg, she introduced herself as, making sure to note there was no relation to the actress) calmingly pointed out every tiny detail that could possibly be of interest, as though the street were Madison Avenue, and Steve a clueless tourist suffering from big-city shock.

They eventually turned a corner onto a quiet street lined with ramshackle two-story houses. A couple of blocks down, they passed a long garage front whose door had been left rolled up. Inside were about ten cars in various states of dismemberment. Someone had left the radio on, currently blasting the d’Agostino’s jingle.

“Move closer to me,” both Rose and Steve sang along, automatically, and then laughed at their out-of-tune unison.

The only weird thing was that the place was deserted. Some of these cars were very expensive, as were the tools strewn about the floor and tables and workbenches. Either the proprietor and his employees were notoriously lax (something Steve highly doubted in this crime-ridden city), or, more likely, someone had made it clear, through either bribery or balls, that Koslovsky’s was not to be messed with.

“They must be out to lunch,” Rose suggested. “Anyway, I’m just on the next block.”

Steve took the hint. “I’ll walk you there and circle back.”

When they reached Rose’s stoop, she asked to be set down on one of the steps.

“You sure?” Steve asked.

“This is my throne room, sweetheart. I’m expecting visitors for the rest of the afternoon.”

Steve marveled at how, here, he’d found the only neighborhood other than Astoria that felt like home. Where the people reminded him of the Brooklyn he’d once known—tight-knit, brittle but kind. Pools of loss shimmering behind everyone’s eyes, shared like a community secret.

“Off you go. Thanks for the arm, Steve,” she said with a smile. “Biggest thrill I’ve had all week. All the girls will be talking about my handsome stranger. You didn’t know it, but I took you the long way to make sure we passed everybody who matters.”

“Any time,” he said with a laugh.

He backtracked to the garage and let himself in. This time, although he still didn’t see anyone, he heard the sound of activity over the music. He followed the sound to the back, and opened the door to the outdoor area behind the building. 

The front had looked like a regular garage, but back here, in this separate space, was almost an artist’s lair. An old Rolls parked in one corner, a newish Jaguar in a different corner. Pride of place went to a row of three motorcycles, models Steve remembered riding during the war, remembered from movies growing up, remembered with the ache of longing. 

Steve scanned the area for the source of the whirring sound of a blowtorch. He eventually spotted two boots sticking out from underneath a Studebaker. 

He waited for a pause in the blowtorch work before shouting, “Hello?”

The guy must have been lying on a creeper, because he began to roll out, inch by inch. The strength of his thighs was visible even in his loose jeans. Steve couldn’t help but notice the impressive bulge just below the man’s belt; for once, he let himself stare, knowing that at least for another few seconds, no one would ever know. A stripe of perfectly chiseled abs flashed just above the man’s belt buckle, followed by a dirty flannel shirt that, like the jeans, did a poor job of hiding the sculpted body underneath. Workman’s gloves covered his hands and a metal mask covered his face, to protect from the torch, Steve assumed. Wavy dark hair topped off this faceless vision and left Steve’s heart hammering with confused want.

“Hey there,” he said, after a gulp. 

“What the hell...” the man began, in a low, almost, but not quite, familiar whisper. 

Steve didn’t know why he sounded so surprised. This was a business, after all. The point was to attract customers. “I’m here about an old car I need repaired.”

No answer. 

Steve barreled along anyway. “Are you Jimmy?”

“How...” The man started shaking, starting first with twitching fingers on his right hand, and then with his entire body. “No. No.”

Steve had to assume the guy was a little touched. He couldn’t see the mechanic’s face, but everything about his body language screamed terror and confusion.

Without warning, the man jumped to his feet, hair flopping down over the welding mask. Faster than Steve would have thought possible for someone of his size, he bolted through the door.

Steve was flabbergasted. He’d never expected much in the way of customer service in New York, but this was a new low. A two-hour ride here and a two-hour ride ahead of him, for nothing. For _this_. He fumed as he went back into the main room of the garage, but there was no sign of the guy. He’d disappeared as completely as a ghost. Steve yanked at a few doors to try to follow, but they were all locked. He stormed back onto the street.

“That was fast!” Rose’s voice called from the next block. 

Needing to blow off steam, Steve stomped his way back to her stoop. She already had company—another old lady who’d brought a box of chocolate cookies and a packet of cigarettes. The friend eyed Steve up and down, mischievousness twinkling behind her enormous pink spectacles. “This your new friend, Rose?”

“What did I tell you?” Rose said smugly. Turning to Steve she said, “This is Sarah.”

“Nice to meet you,” Steve said, politeness on auto-pilot.

“What happened?” Rose asked.

“He wouldn’t even see me. Took one look at me and ran away before I could even say anything. I don’t care how good this guy is. Nobody treats people like that!”

“He came down from Astoria about an old car he needs fixed,” Rose explained to her friend. 

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” Sarah said, seeming to understand the entire situation just from this. Like Steve and Bucky might have been had they had a chance to grow old together, Rose and Sarah didn’t seem to need a lot of words to understand one another. “Jimmy has good days and bad.”

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Steve asked.

“He started hanging around the neighborhood a couple of years ago,” Sarah said, with just the same inflection and rhythm as Rose, but in a slightly wheezier voice. She’d only just shown up, but she had obviously decided that what was Rose’s was hers, too, and was already looking at Steve with similar acquisitive bemusement. “He was living under the boardwalk. But you could tell he was different, not like the other bums.”

“Different how?” Steve asked, skeptical. But not so skeptical to keep him from sitting down with them on the stoop, a quiet agreement to continue listening.

Sarah welcomed him with a cookie. “None of the other bums speak Russian, for one,” she said.

“He’s Russian?” Steve asked.

“Think so,” Rose said. “From one of those countries, anyway. He’s fluent in all the spitting languages.”

“He won’t say what happened, but everyone can tell it was something bad,” Sarah finished in a stage whisper. “More than service, something worse. There’s a look in his eyes. You have to have seen it.”

Steve shook his head.

“Everybody sees it,” Rose pressed.

“He had a mask on.”

“Then you’ll just have to trust us, honey.”

“He has that arm on him, too,” Sarah said, “You don’t see bums with arms like that.”

“What kind of arm?”

“Fancy prosthetic. I’m the only one who’s seen it. He swore me to secrecy.” 

(And she was doing a bang-up job keeping it quiet, Steve thought to himself.)

“Anyway,” Rose said, “one day, Gabe Cohen’s kid—Eli, the little angel…”

“Blond curls and all, but sickly, you know,” Sarah interjected.

“He was walking where he shouldn’t have one evening. Found himself in the middle of some gang argument. And Jimmy comes busting out of nowhere to beat the living daylights out of them all. Saved the kid. He’d been doing the same for months, it came out, all around here. Sticking up for the little guys, and then disappearing into the shadows. We’d heard about it, but didn’t know who it was. Didn’t even know it was all the same guy until Eli and then some of the other kids ID’ed him.”

“He won’t accept any charity,” Sarah continued, in the same key Rose had been talking in, and without missing a beat, in a way that told Steve they’d tag-teamed this story before. “But he _would_ take odd jobs, so that’s what everybody started giving him. Koslovsky’s is where he really found his place. He’s turned that whole shop around. Now we’ve got people like you coming from all over to go there. The neighborhood hasn’t felt so safe in longer than I can remember. I don’t know what things are like up in _Astoria_ ,” she said with a derogatory sniff, “but we’re pretty close-knit down here, don’t take to outsiders very easily. But with Jimmy—he’s one of us now.”

As they were speaking, a young boy ran up to them. 

“What’s the matter?” Rose asked.

“The boss sent me,” the kid said breathlessly, leaning forward to rest his palms on his knees as he caught his breath. He looked up at Steve. “Wanted me to tell you he was sorry. Said to get your number. He’ll give you a call.”

Steve had been softened by the story, but he was still annoyed about having wasted an entire afternoon on an errand that wasn’t going anywhere. “A call? I schlepped all the way out here from Queens. And now I have to wait for a call?”

“Boss said he could call. Talk about the job and see if it’s worth both your time. Please, mister.”

“Why can’t he talk about it now? I can go back.”

“Can’t.” The kid glanced at Rose, who nodded.

“Having an episode?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Well, shit. Even without that whole sob story, Steve felt like a heel and a half. “All right. You got something to write on?”

The kid pulled a gum wrapper and stubby pencil, probably stolen from the local library, out of his shorts pocket.

“Fancy stationary,” Steve joked, but he wrote ‘Steve Grant’ and the Demapolous’s phone number in as big print as could fit.

“Thanks.”

After he’d run off again, Steve saluted Rose and Sarah.

“Well, it was nice to meet you, ladies.”

“Hope we see you again around here soon,” Rose said. “Look me up next time. Keep the scandal of our romance going.”

Steve laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll come back, just for you.”

“What am I?” Sarah asked. “Chopped liver?”

“I’m a one-woman kind of guy,” Steve said, but kissed her, too.

Since he was already down here, and had nowhere else to be until his shift started at eight, he walked down to Coney Island. He hadn’t been since coming back—back to New York, back to life. This place had always symbolized a lot for him. A special occasion. Friends, fun... Bucky. The things he’d fought for. 

It wasn’t the long ride that had put him off all this time. It was fear. Fear that, like so much else in the city, he would visit only to discover that yet another thing he’d loved had changed irrevocably, and for the worse.

However, as he got closer, making his way down Ocean Parkway, Steve began to feel some tingles of positivity. There was a shabbiness to the place, just as he remembered, but it was a lived-in, not a dangerous, shabbiness. Grey’s remained just as odoriferous as ever. The popcorn guys heckled with the same tired phrases. Peeping over the buildings in front of him, Steve could see the top of the Wonder Wheel, which he had assumed had been knocked down years ago.

As he strolled along the boardwalk, memories washed over him, in time with the lapping waves brought in by heavy winds. Evenings spent with friends, with Bucky. Evenings when it had been just the two of them. Evenings when they’d gone on awful double dates. Evenings where they’d come with other friends, and run into one another anyway. 

Steve had never had the strength nor the eyesight for the carnival games at which Bucky—sure shot, even as a kid—had always excelled. But today he stopped, threw a few balls, won a bear. He imagined what Bucky would have said when Steve would have handed it to him. He didn’t need to imagine how his heart would have hurt, how his own looping irony would have choked him as he pretended to give Bucky the bear as a joke, because, of course, Bucky wasn’t his sweetheart.

But Bucky wasn’t here. Wasn’t anywhere. Was dead. 

Steve sat the bear, along with himself, on the edge of the boardwalk. He took his shoes and socks off, and let the breeze blow between his toes. He pretended he was young again (he felt old, so old), as the familiar music, tinny now after having played the same recording for decades, played behind him.

If he had the feeling he was being watched, he chalked it up to the ghosts who floated by him in his memories. He didn’t seriously think anyone had found him, was watching him. 

He'd gone by Herald Square a couple of times, even paid a kid twenty bucks to go into lobby of the building and write down all the names of the listed tenants. They'd all turned out to be legit businesses: fabric wholesalers, a couple of fashion photographers, a wine importer. But Steve had a feeling the ones he was looking for wouldn't be listed. Just to be safe, though, he’d made sure to throw whoever it was off the scent. He had even gone up to Boston and given his name out to let them think he’d left the city. He'd eventually stopped looking over his shoulder. 

So it must have been ghosts who followed him way home, but every time Steve turned around, he saw nothing.

* * *

“Seedless watermelon?” Steve asked Luis a couple of days later. He’d come to the greengrocer’s to pick up his weekly order, but had gotten distracted by this new fruit. 

“Yeah, I got it special order. If this blows up the way seedless grapes did, one day soon, no one will be spitting seeds at each other anymore.”

“That’s just unnatural,” Steve said. “And a damn shame.”

“Your order’s in the back. I can have Ron…”

“No, don’t put him out. He’s got other stuff to do. I’ll get it.” Steve always insisted on getting his order himself; no reason to force some poor kid to carry such a big crate all by himself. 

“How’s my car coming along?” Luis asked as they walked together to the storeroom.

“Still working on finding someone. The rec I got the other day didn’t work out like I hoped.”

“You’ll find someone. By the way, there was a guy here yesterday. Asking about you.”

“Who?” Steve instantly straightened in alarm, thinking of the soldiers.

“Beatnik kind of guy. Floppy hair, needed a shave, you know the kind.”

That didn’t sound like the people who’d chased him that day. They had all been as bland-faced as the spies Peggy had sometimes worked with. There was nothing to worry about, Steve told himself. If they’d known anything about anything, they’d have sent one of those bland faces to question Luis, not a judgment-attracting beatnik. “What was he asking?”

“Just how long you’d been in the neighborhood, what you were like, if you were available for jobs. I think he has an offer for you, but wanted to check up on you first. Going by his looks. I’d say no, if I were you.”

“You never know,” Steve joked, already put at ease. There had been people calling about jobs before, as Steve’s reputation in the neighborhood had grown. “For all we know, he’s a millionaire with a big art collection that needs guarding. If he comes by again, take his number for me.”

He went home and listened to public radio on his couch. Dinner was the microwaved bolognese that Mrs. Demapolous had dropped off a couple of days before, along with her weekly admonition that he was going to develop diabetes soon if he didn’t find a wife to make him eat properly. Then, she had talked at length about her niece.

Almost as soon as his weekly program finished, the phone rang. Steve leaped up to adjust the volume, before crossing to the windowsill where the phone sat. 

“Hi?” he gasped, still swallowing.

There was a longer than expected pause before a lightly accented Russian voice said, “Hello. I’m looking for Steve.” 

“Speaking.” And, because he didn’t get a lot of calls from Russians, and also had the ability to put two and two together, he asked, “Is this Jimmy?”

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

Another awkward pause. “Sorry about…” Jimmy continued, in the kind of blustery rush that hinted at hidden effort. “Rose told me you were looking to get an old car fixed up. What’s the make?”

“It’s a Packard Custom Speedster. From 1942.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” Jimmy’s voice—or maybe it was his accent—cracked like an excited kid’s. Taken in concert with the image of the guy that had been burned into Steve’s brain, and the story Rose had told, it was a lot, hilarious and endearing all at once. 

“What, have you worked on one before?” he asked.

“No, haven’t seen one since… Since I, uh, first saw it in a catalogue. But I’ve wanted one for… for as long as I can remember. So did…” Jimmy gave up trying to explain and went back to his previous excitement. “How the hell’d you get your hands on one? They’re rare as rare gets these days.”

“It belongs to a neighbor of mine, actually. Old guy who bought it second-hand when he was young and loves it as much as I do. And you, too, apparently. But it’s spent almost twenty years as nothing more than the world’s biggest paperweight. We made a deal. If I can find someone to fix it, and foot the bill, he’ll let me drive it as much as I like. He and his wife have been kind to me. It would make him happy to know it’s in working order again.”

“A ‘42 Packard,” Jimmy repeated, still sounding awestruck. “Fuck me. What’s the matter with it?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to tell me. Except you never gave me a chance to ask.” 

“If I’d known what you were coming for I’d have…”

“You’d have what? Not thrown me out?” Steve asked, but he tried to infuse as much light-hearted teasing into his tone as possible—just enough to make it clear that he was over it, but not so much to imply that he hadn’t minded in the moment.

“I…” Jimmy didn’t answer. “She must be a beaut. I’m assuming she isn’t in driving condition, or else you wouldn’t need me, right? Hey, how about, instead of making you come down here again… We’ve got a truck. Maybe…”

“You throw people out of your shop, but you offer to make house calls?” Steve joked. “Something doesn’t fit.”

“Maybe I just don’t want you down here again. I didn’t like how Patty was talking you up.”

“Who the hell is Patty?” 

“A little old lady who lives down on Bay Avenue. Word spreads fast around here. Everyone’s talking about Rose’s handsome new friend. Rose has made sure of it.”

“I’m sure she has,” Steve said with a smile.

“So now even Patty’s singing your praises, to _me_. And hell, _I’m_ the golden boy around here. I don’t need this kind of competition. So, I thought I oughta deal with the situation before it gets out of hand. Keep you away from the neighborhood.”

The initial undertone of effort had disappeared from Jimmy’s voice during his excitement about the Packard, and during his irritation over the favoritism. His rhythm and tone now sounded as pleasantly ironic as Bucky’s ever had when trying to get a rise out of Steve. This conversation sounded sounded so familiar, yet simultaneously new (and ridiculous) with the accent. Steve’s previous annoyance slipped away entirely. 

“So, it’s a turf war, is it?” he teased. “Well, what if I don’t want you around here either? What if I don’t want you stealing all my old folks’ doting?”

“So it’s true. You _are_ competition. You’re the probably the golden boy of… where do you live? Riverdale?” 

“Astoria,” Steve said, despite having an inkling that Jimmy had heard perfectly well where he was from.

“I’m so sorry to hear that. How’d a classy guy like you end up in Queens?”

“You think I’m classy?” Steve asked, silently thrilling. 

“Too classy for Queens. But that isn’t saying much.”

“You can get off your high horse. You may live in Brooklyn now, but I grew up in Fort Greene. That’s where all this class comes from.”

“Uh huh. Sure.”

Steve grinned. This was the most fun he’d had with someone ‘his age’ since he’d woken up. He wished he had a face to put with the body, and now the voice, both attractive. 

“So, that’s it?” he asked, hoping he could keep this going awhile longer. It wasn’t as though he had anything else to do this evening. “You’re gonna come all the way up here to fix my car so you can stay in all the ladies’ good graces?”

“Sort of. I also got chewed out for disappearing on you. I’m trying to redeem myself here.”

“Who chewed you out? Koslovsky?” And Steve wondered when he’d started to be on this guy’s side, when he’d switched over to a place where no one was allowed to yell at Jimmy for appallingly poor customer service. 

“Fuck no. Koslovsky doesn’t give a shit,” Jimmy said, and then made a sound that might have resembled Bucky’s joyous guffaw, if only he hadn’t choked it down halfway. “It was Sarah.”

“But she was the one telling me to take it easy on you.”

“Are you surprised? Think of your ma. Defending you to strangers, then dressing you down the second they get you alone. Sound familiar?”

“Pretty much,” Steve said, because his mother _had_ been like that. Bucky’s, too. And this guy’s as well, it seemed.

“So, you gonna let me make it up to you?” Jimmy’s question came out sounding just this side of flirtatious, which Steve told himself he had to have imagined (but wished he hadn’t). 

He’d never learned how to flirt, never learned how to talk to women—and, obviously, had never even _tried_ to talk to a man like that—but if there was one thing Steve knew how to do, it was respond to ribbing. Even if this guy’s ribbing almost sounded like flirting. 

So, Steve shot back, low and teasing, “You have anything special in mind?”

There was a pause, and then Steve’s enhanced hearing picked up on a gulp, as though Jimmy hadn’t expected Steve to play along. 

“Hello?” Steve asked when the silence continued.

Sounding choked again (and dammit, Steve definitely must have imagined it, and now he’d fucked it up), Jimmy replied, more seriously, almost business-like, “What about next Friday afternoon?”

The almost-maybe moment had passed. Steve could have hit himself.

“Sure,” he said. “Friday works. That just so happens to be the first time I’m free all week.”

“How about that?” Jimmy said, with a forced-sounding deadpan that didn’t fit at all with his accent.

Steve gave him the address of a diner near the subway, thinking to save him the hassle of navigating a new neighborhood, as he’d had to do in Sheepshead Bay. But secretly, he was hoping that, during the walk to Ken’s house, they might get to talk more, and not about cars.

* * *

Nothing Steve did around Astoria went unnoticed. Nor did his aura of expectant good spirits. He spent the next week fielding nosy questions about what lay behind his uncommonly good mood. He deflected them with bland explanations about the balmy weather raising his spirits, or said that he was simply riding the high of a well-strategized commute. 

But when Friday afternoon at last rolled around, his bubble burst, because it was a different man who parked a truck near the diner in which Steve sat, drinking a coffee by the window and buzzing with hopeful suspense. An older, slighter man, with a much thicker Russian accent than the one on the phone walked through the doors, making the bells jingle. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Steve watched as this not-Jimmy asked the hostess to point him out.

“What happened to Jimmy?” he asked before even saying hello.

“He’s busy,” the man said.

“I thought he was going to… Is he okay?”

“Sure.” The man shrugged. “Where is car?”

Steve signed all the papers on Luis’s behalf, got a contract for work as yet unquoted, and a guarantee for the safety of the vehicle while it would be out of Ken’s care. This Russian mechanic knew nothing about vintage cars, but he knew how to interact with a customer. The entire procedure couldn’t have been more professional.

All the same, Steve couldn’t help but feel let down. He watched the truck drive out of sight, carrying the car away, and felt empty.

* * *

When the phone rang a few days later, Steve practically dove for it. Mrs. Demapolous had been taken to the hospital earlier that day, with a possible heart attack, and he’d been waiting all evening for news from her daughter.

But instead of Gloria’s nasal elongation of the ‘e’s in ‘hey’ and ‘Steve’, he got a man’s voice instead.

“Hi, Steve. It’s Jimmy, from the garage.”

Steve shut his eyes and told himself to keep calm. After a quick exhalation, he tossed out what he thought was a casual, “Oh, hey. What’s up?”

“You okay?” Jimmy asked quickly, worriedly.

“Why do you ask?”

“You sound like you’re dying. Or massively constipated.”

Steve frowned. “I’m fine. How’s the car?”

Jimmy must have been able to hear the terseness in Steve’s tone, but he breezed along, as though nothing were wrong. “A wreck. But a salvageable wreck. Do you know how many people I’ve had to call to track down the parts she needs?”

“No,” Steve said.

“It was a lot. Packard went out of business by 1960, so even the parts are collectibles. There were a couple I couldn’t get, but I’m pretty sure I can jerry-rig them.”

“How much is this going to run me?” Steve asked, now concerned that this had become even more of a boondoggle than he’d anticipated. Custom-recreated parts sounded expensive.

“Five hundred. It’ll take me a few weeks though.”

“For a one of a kind full repair job? With custom parts? How does Koslovsky stay in business?” Steve had done dis due diligence, maybe not on this car, but at least on comparable antique overhauls. A job like this ought to cost a couple of thousand, at least. The quality of work he’d seen in Koslovsky’s garage ought to have cost even more.

“I told the boss this one’s for me. It won’t cost him anything. I’m working on it after hours. I’m only charging you the cost of the parts.”

“Because you love Packards,” Steve deadpanned. Yet again, he’d started this conversation brimming with disappointed annoyance, and yet again, he could already feel himself being disarmed, bit by bit.

“Because I love Packards. Exactly. So, five hundred sounds good?”

“At least let me help,” Steve said. “Reduce the labor costs a little.”

“You’d break something. No, you leave it to me. Just sit up there in Queens and look pretty.”

Steve felt himself flush at that, even though it was just a turn of phrase, even though Jimmy couldn’t possibly be… “Sure, five hundred sounds good. It’s a deal. You know, I was surprised you didn’t come get it yourself, the way you’d been talking.” This time, Steve didn’t bother trying to dissemble his disappointment; he’d never been very good at it, and even over the phone, this stranger had already proven quick to see through him.

“I, uh, sorry. I wanted to, I did. I just…”

“It’s all right. We all have bad days.”

“You’ve heard about mine, haven’t you? Rose and Sarah and their big mouths,” Jimmy said, rueful but fond.

“Yeah, they did. Hey, do you mind if I ask where you served? They told me, down in your neighborhood…”

“That I was a POW?”

“No, they didn’t tell me that. Damn. Look, if you don’t want to—”

“I don’t.” 

Steve braved through the pause that followed, silently daring Jimmy to break first. His stubbornness had always won, with everyone, even back with Bucky, who’d been the stubbornest person Steve had ever known, after himself.

“So,” Jimmy eventually said. “You never told me what you wanted the car for. Once it’s fixed, where are you going to drive it?”

Steve relaxed for the first time that night. He leaned against the windowsill, enjoying the cool of the glass against his back. “I was thinking of saving up some more and then taking a trip to California.”

“You wanna drive this thing cross-country?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“What are you gonna do if it breaks down in the middle of Missouri or something?”

“You’re not giving me a lot of confidence in the quality of your work.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the quality of my work,” Jimmy said. “It’s just that these things are old. They need a lot of maintenance. Even if I do the best job in the world—which I will, by the way—it shouldn’t go more than a few hundred miles without a mechanic on hand.”

“Sounds like I should pack you in the trunk along with my luggage.”

“Or better yet, let me drive. It’ll be safer for everyone that way.”

“I… Wait, what?” Steve sputtered, forgetting the comeback he’d been about to use. Because… well, because he never _had_ been the world’s strongest driver. That had always been Bucky’s job, whenever his uncle the mechanic had given him illicit use of one of the cars he’d fixed up. Even during the war, Bucky had done most of the driving, on the grounds that Steve’s recklessness would get them all killed otherwise. But Jimmy didn’t know that. “What the hell do you know about my driving?”

“You spend enough time with cars, you can start to smell who’s good with them, and who’s hopeless. You, my friend, are one of the hopeless ones.”

Steve was too much of a New Yorker to take the world ‘friend’ too seriously, but wished that he could. “You got a hell of a lot off me in a two-second interaction.” 

“What do you call this right now? And last week? Isn’t this interaction?”

“Sure.” Steve smiled to himself. They were doing it again, tapping into the kind of easy connection Steve had begun to despair he’d ever find again with anyone under the age of sixty. “Speaking of which, I meant to ask you the other day… I’ve never heard of a Russian named Jimmy. What’s your story?”

“That’s classified,” was the curt reply.

“Okay,” Steve said, remembering what Sarah and Rose had said about Jimmy being damaged, broken by something worse than service. “For what it’s worth, so is mine.”

“Guess we’ve got nothing to talk about, then, except the present.”

“The present’s not that interesting,” Steve said, with more honesty than the moment probably demanded.

“Sure it is. The present is… It’s so much better.”

“Than what?”

“Than…” Jimmy faltered. “Than some of the alternatives.”

It was a strange thing to say, and Steve didn’t have a response, but he also didn’t want to get off the phone, not yet. “What’s that noise?” he asked. “In the background.”

“It’s the air vent from the Chinese restaurant I’m standing outside of,” Jimmy said.

“You’re on the street?”

“Yeah, I… I don’t have a phone. Just a beeper.”

“What’s a beeper?” Steve asked.

He was rewarded with a low, warm chuckle. “You really have been hanging out with only old people.” 

Jimmy explained the concept and how it worked. Steve thought it sounded ingenious, but relying on it would probably require more quarters than he wanted to carry around in his pockets. He said as much and was rewarded with another chuckle.

Steve wanted to keep saying unintentionally dopey stuff, just to keep hearing that sound. 

“Where’d you get something like that?” he asked.

“J&R. Right by City Hall.”

“Oh, I haven’t been over that way since… since I moved back to the city.”

“Oh yeah? You should go. It’s becoming less of a ghost town on the weekend. There’s this whole new park now, and some fancy high rises. And a cool glass building, like the biggest greenhouse you’ve ever seen. You can sit there all day long if you like, and look at the rich people’s yachts.”

“A park?” Steve asked. He couldn’t think of where they would even put a park. Manhattan island narrowed down to nothing around there.

“They built it on top of the landfill,” Jimmy explained. “You should check it out. You’d… I’ve got a hunch you’d like it.”

Steve wanted to ask Jimmy to go with him, but there was something about the tone of the suggestion that kept him from asking. And the last thing he wanted to do was scare Jimmy off. 

“Okay. I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m anywhere near there. And if you have any other tips… I only moved back to the city a year ago. A lot’s changed.” Steve hoped the implied ‘and call me any time to tell me’ had been understood.

“Sure, I’ll keep an eye out. Speaking of which… Where were you before? I mean, how did you end up in Astoria?” Jimmy’s voice faltered again, as it did just every so often, similar to how Steve’s voice had faltered earlier when he’d been trying to act cool and unruffled.

Steve had no idea why.

“I don’t really know,” Steve said honestly. “I didn’t plan it or anything. I just sort of… found myself back in the city.” Skipping over the bit about waking up in a stage set and being chased by soldiers, Steve told the story of how he’d been a dazed vet riding the subway. He told the story of meeting Ken and saving him from those kids.

“Of course you did,” Jimmy said softly. He slipped into thoughtful silence that was soon interrupted by the sound of a car alarm. “Fucking hell,” he grumbled. “I should go.”

And without any more warning than that, Steve was left listening to a dial tone.

* * *

Steve had been busier than usual. His coworker at the club tore his shoulder at the gym, which meant that Steve got called on to take over his shifts. He also got a call for a multi-day job transporting an art collection from a Fifth Avenue apartment to Sotheby’s to pay for the couple’s divorce. 

Ever since the serum, it had taken a lot to make him tired, but all this work had managed to do it. However, Steve wasn’t going to complain. Work was a distraction from the empty loneliness that followed him wherever he went, and the more money he made, the sooner he could go on his trip.

He didn’t even make it to the bed when he got home after working for thirty-six straight hours. He barely even make it out of his clothes. With his dress shirt still half-buttoned and his stretched-out knee socks scrunched around his ankles, he collapsed on his ratty couch and slept until his rumbling stomach woke him up a few hours later. 

The phone rang while he was standing over his hot plate, waiting for his lo mein leftovers to reheat.

“Hey, Steve, it’s… Holy shit, that shouldn’t be possible.”

“Jimmy?” Steve asked, voice cracking from disuse. “What… what’s going on?”

“Don’t tell me you’re not watching this.”

“Watching what?”

“The fucking Dream Team. They’re taking Croatia to school. Channel 4. Come on.”

Steve dumped the still lukewarm food into a bowl and turned on the TV. He heard the cheers of the crowd before the picture actually appeared. The phone cord wasn’t long enough to stretch all the way to the couch, so he sat on the floor in the middle of the room, bowl balanced on his knees. 

“Is this the final?” he asked.

“Yeah. And it’s beautiful.” 

“If you don’t have a phone, how are you watching this?”

“I’m dog-sitting for one of my neighbors. She had to go out of town for a funeral, so I’m crashing. It’s a nice place. Got my feet up and everything.”

Jimmy’s excitement seemed to have surpassed his ability to express it, so they watched in silence, with Steve chewing into the phone and the echo of the game coming through the phone with a split-second lag. Within a few minutes, even Steve had gotten so into the game that the fact that he was on the phone with someone he didn’t really know faded into the background. They cheered at the same time, urged the team on with increasing fervor.

“So, what’s the update?” Steve asked when the first commercial break paused the action.

“On the job?” Jimmy asked, sounding like he had forgotten he was on the phone.

“Yeah, on the job,” Steve said.

“Haven’t had a ton of time to work on it in the past week.”

“You have everything you need? No anticipated problems?” Steve asked, because he wasn’t really sure why else Jimmy would have called him. 

“What? No. It’s fine.”

“Okay.” Steve put down his empty bowl.

“How’ve you been?” Jimmy asked absently, over the Olive Garden commercial.

“Fine, I guess. Tired. It’s been a big week.”

“Oh yeah? How come?”

“I work a lot of nights, but this week I worked a lot of days, too.” 

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

Steve wasn’t sure why Jimmy cared, but he didn’t really want to get off the phone. So, he began to detail all his various gigs.

“This is boring,” he said eventually, cutting himself off.

“Listen, Steve. I’m not…” Jimmy seemed to wake up a bit, to consider his words more than he had been. “If you start boring me, trust me, I’ll let you know.”

The game resumed, and the conversation focused once more on cheering and dissecting the plays. Steve decided to stop questioning what they were doing and just go with it.

At the next break, he remembered something more interesting than work—the only interesting thing he’d done all week. “I checked out that park you told me about, on the waterfront. You were right. The yachts were something. I had no idea that whole place was there.”

“It’s crazy, right?”

“Yeah, it made for a really good afternoon. If you have any more ideas…”

“I’ll keep you in mind.”

“You have my number.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Steve had barely turned on his TV in the year that he’d been living here. He still listened to the radio most nights, even though the kinds of programs he’d once enjoyed had largely died out over the years. But tonight, with someone to watch with him, sort of, Steve began to see the point of TV. 

They kept watching and talking, long after the game ended and the broadcast had switched over to track and field.

* * *

“You’re eating even more than usual,” Luis said during Steve’s weekly pick-up.

“Funny you say that, because Esther says I’m looking skinny.”

“You’re working too hard. I see you in the mornings. You don’t get home until dawn and then you do work around the neighborhood. I see you.”

“I don’t need a lot of sleep,” Steve said with a shrug.

“How’s my car?” Luis asked next, as he did every time he saw Steve.

“It’s coming,” Steve said brightly, beginning to back out of the store, with the hand cart he’d brought for the crate. “I get frequent updates from the mechanic.”

“Well, what’s taking him so long? It’s been at least a couple of months.”

“It’s coming!” Steve promised vaguely, and rolled his way out of there too fast for Luis to follow.

He hadn’t lied; he _was_ in constant contact with the mechanic. The only problem was that they’d slowly stopped talking about the car. As promised, they also never talked about the past; therefore, in order to keep having conversation topics to share with Jimmy, Steve had been forced to engage with the present in a way he hadn’t before this odd friendship had sprung up. He’d started _doing_ things besides work and eat and sleep. He took Jimmy’s advice for ways to fill his waking hours, and even started thinking of his own ideas. He’d even started taking some of his coworkers up on offers for drinks after their shifts (or coffee, if the shift had been a late one). They’d turned out to be nice guys, for the most part, and Steve wished he’d gotten to know them sooner.

“You keep saying you wish you could go back and fight, that you wish there was a worthwhile war again,” Jimmy had said one night early on, over the sound of some kids playing in a fire hydrant near his payphone. “Which, aside from being the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard… I mean, you’ve _been_ to war. You know what it’s like. Who the fuck wants to go _back_? But, what I mean is… Look around you, Steve. The whole city’s a war zone these days. You ended up living in fucking _Queens_ because some old blind man couldn’t even go for a walk without getting beat up by assholes. You’ve got subway conductors passing out drunk and crashing trains, killing people. You’ve got school principals getting shot in the schools. You want something worth fighting for? Why don’t you fight for here? Go clean up a park so kids can play ball, for chrissakes, and stop looking abroad for ways to get shot at.”

It wasn’t bad advice. Steve had been restless for a year, itching for a fight, but Jimmy was right. There was plenty to fight for here, in this broken down New York. 

So, in addition to his many paying jobs, Steve had started on this project, too. There was a small park near his house that had been taken over by drug dealers. With some firm words, some flexing, and a complete lack of fear, he’d reclaimed it completely, and now spent his free mornings simultaneously standing guard and digging with the old ladies who were trying to make the green space nice again. 

And he spent his nights by the phone, hoping Jimmy would give him a call. He had the beeper number, but Jimmy said he preferred people only contact him during emergencies. 

“Hey,” Jimmy said later that night, “I was working on the Packard today and I got to thinking.”

“That doesn’t sound productive.”

“Shut it, Rogers,” Jimmy said, and it was staggering, sometimes, how much his mannerisms sometimes mirrored Bucky’s, and how it made Steve long, all over again. “Anyway, you never told me about the trip you wanna take with it. Why California? Why with this thing?”

“It was always something I promised myself I’d do one day.”

“By yourself?”

“No, but the person I wanted to do it with is dead, so. Alone it is,” Steve said, hoping against irrational hope that Jimmy would offer to come with. They’d never met, but Steve felt as though they’d known each other for years.

As usual, Jimmy didn’t take the bait. “Anybody waiting for you when you get there?”

“There’s one guy. And old friend of mine.”

“How old?” 

It was a fair question, given that they’d both already established themselves as beloved by the elderly. “Pretty old,” Steve said with a privately sad chuckle. “It took me awhile to track him down. I’m thinking of surprising him.”

“That doesn’t sound like a great idea. Old friends change. You might not like what they’ve become. They might not want to be surprised. Why don’t you call first?”

“I tried,” Steve admitted. “I couldn’t get through to him. I called up the… the place where he works, but they wouldn’t put me through. And his number isn’t listed.”

What Steve didn’t say was that he’d called up Stark Industries, and asked to speak to the CEO. Various attempts and dogged politeness had landed him on the phone with Howard’s personal secretary. But when Steve had told her his name, she’d told him he should be ashamed of himself, prank calling Howard like that. She’d memorized his voice, and eventually, after burning through three long-distance phone cards, Steve had given up trying.

But if he showed up at the headquarters in person, he kept telling himself, no one would be able to stop him. Maybe with a rich and connected ally to help him, he’d finally get some answers—about how he’d survived, about the soldiers. Maybe even find out where Peggy was.

As if reading Steve’s mind, Jimmy asked, “Is this the only old friend you’re going to see? I don’t know a lot of guys willing to go through all that just to reconnect with a friend. You sure there isn’t a girl out there?”

“You sound like Esther,” Steve said. “Always trying to find me a date. It’s really tiring.”

“Aw, they’re just trying to be nice. It means we all like you. Don’t be a brat about it.”

“You sound like another old friend of mine,” Steve said. “He used to try to find me girls, and say I was being a brat when I didn’t want to go out with them.”

“This friend of yours sounds like a smart guy,” Jimmy replied, as he always did whenever Steve happened to mention Bucky, never by name. “But I mean it. Is there a girl out in California? Is that why you turn down all the nice old ladies’ nieces? What’s the problem? Because I’ve seen you. And you don’t look like the kind of guy who needs people to find him dates.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve said, growing warm at the compliment. 

“You know exactly what it means. You have a mirror.”

“It’s easy to tease when you know the other person has no idea what you look like.”

“You know what I look like, Steve,” Jimmy said softly.

Everyone had told Steve, for his whole life, how brave he was. Brave all the times he was sick in the hospital, brave for wanting to enlist, brave to go to Austria to rescue those men. Even after he’d stopped listening, books had been written about how brave he’d been to down that plane. But Steve had never felt brave, not until right now, when he finally decided to smash down Jimmy’s quietly understood barrier.

“How about we do something this weekend? Then I’d know what you look like.”

“I’ve got a lot going on,” Jimmy said flatly, sounding scared for the first time since those odd moments in their initial few interactions. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Steve said, slightly deflated, but still hyped up.

“Steve,” Jimmy began. “I…”

“For the record, there _is_ someone I’m hung up on,” Steve blurted out, mostly in order to avoid hearing whatever bullshit Jimmy was about to come out with. “From…. From before. I never got to say anything. And then… And then it was too late, and now I’m here.”

“She must have been a hell of a girl,” Jimmy whispered. “Do you know what happened to her? Did she get married? They always do.”

“There was a girl… a hell of a girl, actually, and I read that she did get married awhile back, but that’s not who I’m talking about. I’m actually…” Even though he was alone, Steve still had to close his eyes before taking the plunge and saying it aloud for the first time in his life. “I’m actually not talking about a woman at all.”

“Shit,” Jimmy breathed. 

“I get it if you don’t want to talk… if that’s a problem for you. But you’re the first person to really ask me about it, and I decided I didn’t want to lie any more. He already died for me. The least I can do is be honest about it.”

Jimmy was quiet for a moment before asking, slowly, measured, “Is this the friend you’re always talking about?”

“How do you know it’s only one guy?” Steve asked, trying to reintroduce some of their usual levity into the conversation. “Why don’t you think I had more than one friend?”

“I know you had more than one friend. I mean, I’m sure you did. But I know when you’re talking about the one guy and when you’re talking about the others.”

“He died, Jimmy,” Steve said, gasping back a sob. He’d bottled his grief for so long, had never really processed it, much less had anyone to talk about it with.

“I know. You said. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry,” Jimmy said. After a minute, he added, “For what it’s worth, I have a feeling he felt the same way.”

“What do you know about it?” Steve asked, lashing out, because in all their conversations, Jimmy had never been cruel, never done more than tease.

“I know you.”

Steve had bought a longer phone cord a few weeks ago, once it became clear that these conversations were going to become a regular occurrence. Tonight, he was able to stretch out on the sofa and bury his head in his arms, phone a few inches away from his face.

“Steve, you there?” Jimmy asked after a long silence in which Steve simply breathed.

“I’m here.”

“Okay.”

“We’re okay, right?” Steve asked, just to be sure. “You don’t mind that—”

“We’re okay.”

“Where are you tonight?” Steve asked next, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to say on the previous subject. 

“I got a phone a couple weeks ago. Started paying my landlord the fifteen bucks a month it costs to add another line to his bill. I’m putting it on your tab, by the way, because it’s entirely your fault. So, now you’re at $530.”

Steve didn’t care about the money. Only one thing stuck out to him. Incredulously, he asked, “You got a phone just to talk to me? I had no idea my conversation was so scintillating.”

“More like so stupid. I talk to you mostly so I have stories to tell the guys I work with. They know all about the idiot with the Packard.”

But Steve couldn’t let it go. “You got a phone just so you could talk to me, but you won’t hang out.”

“I never said I wouldn’t hang—”

“Jimmy,” Steve said, employing his Captain America tone.

“Yes, sir?” Jimmy said, automatically, and in what must have been a parody of an American accent. 

Steve even thought he heard Jimmy’s heels snap together in attention. 

Neither of them could keep a straight face—or voice, really—after that. They burst out laughing, and then transitioned to other, less dangerous topics. But Steve felt as though he’d finally shaken off an anvil that had been pressing him down. The past few weeks had helped to loosen it, but tonight… tonight he finally felt free, and as brave and forthright as the Captain America of the history books. Tonight, he felt alive. 

And he knew what he wanted to do tomorrow.

* * *

The conductor had tried to announce something, but the train’s broken speaker system had garbled the words beyond comprehension. As a result, half the passengers broke into savory expletives when skipped stations made it clear that this local train was now going express. Steve counted among the other half—the ones whose day had been made by the unexpected service change. He reached Sheepshead Bay in record time. 

The garage door had been left rolled down today, probably to keep out the rain that had stopped only an hour or so ago, but the green front door was propped open. Steve hovered quietly just outside. 

Peeking in, he saw three men arguing around a gently smoking BMW 5 Series. Whatever was wrong with it, it didn’t smell good. Steve recognized Anton, who’d come to Astoria with the truck. And although they’d never met, he recognized Koslovsky’s deep, wet smoker’s cough from Jimmy’s spot-on impersonations. The third figure, back turned to the door while he watched and listened to the impassioned Russian being blasted at him, had to be Jimmy. He’d only seen him once, but Steve would have recognized those shoulders anywhere. Jimmy stood with his hands shoved in his pockets and the toes of his boots pointing inwards, just as Bucky had used to stand when the nuns were scolding him in Sunday School. Like a magnet, the sight pulled Steve inside.

Koslovsky paused when he spotted him. The other two turned to look as well, and… and blue eyes as familiar as the ones in Steve’s mirror locked with his. This couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. The Jimmy of reality was the Jimmy of Steve’s fantasies—a muscular Adonis wearing Bucky’s face.

Bucky—because it was Bucky’s lips and Bucky’s hair and Bucky’s chin and Bucky’s patented ‘what the hell?’ expression—froze like a deer caught in the world’s brightest headlight. Bucky… It _had_ to be Bucky. A doppelganger or a ghost wouldn’t have stared at Steve like _he_ was the ghost.

What the hell, Steve thought. What the hell.

“Yes?” Koslovsky asked with a touch of irritation.

“Packard,” Anton tersely explained when Steve didn’t—couldn’t—answer.

“Ah,” Koslovsky said. “Your customer, Yakov.” 

Yakov—Jimmy— _Bucky_ looked about set to bolt again, but Steve was prepared this time, prepared to give chase and win. Bucky must have sensed this, because he quickly abandoned his pre-running stance. Instead, he raised his right hand, as though to run his fingers through his hair. On the way up, his index finger and thumb tugged quickly at his ear, and he winked. The movements went unnoticed by his coworkers, but Steve immediately recognized the gesture as one of the signals they had developed during the war. A signal that basically meant, “Follow my lead, Steve and try not to say anything stupid. Better yet, don’t say anything at all.”

For the first time ever, Steve followed the directions with absolutely no resistance—neither verbal nor gesticular—because that confirmed it, exploded any lingering doubts. Jimmy was Bucky. Bucky was alive. Everything and nothing made sense, just the way Steve liked it. 

“You wanted to see the progress, hm?” Bucky said, with the accent that he’d used during their calls. Turning to Koslovsky, he said something in Russian.

Koslovsky threw up his hands and Steve didn’t need to understand Russian to get that he was granting exasperated permission to abandon the BMW for his personal project.

“It’s a couple of blocks away,” Bucky said. “I’ll take you.”

Steve still hadn’t said anything, still stood paralyzed in the doorway, so much so that Bucky practically had to shove past him to get out. 

“Come on,” he said with an eye roll and jerk of his head. 

“Bucky,” Steve wheezed, as soon as his tongue and feet remembered how to move. 

“Not here,” Bucky snapped. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I shouldn’t be here? You shouldn’t be here! You _died_ , Buck.” It was all Steve could do not to grab Bucky’s hand, throw his arms around him.

“So did you, you numbskull. Speaking of which… What the hell were you thinking? You couldn’t have even _tried_ to land that plane?”

“No, because…” But Steve didn’t care enough to continue. He stopped walking, forcing Bucky to stop, too. He put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders, meaning to keep him still, but ending up rubbing lightly up and down, getting lost in feeling how real and solid and _now_ he was. “Bucky, what’s going on? I watched you fall down that ravine. I’ve watched you fall in my mind every day since. How are you here? And how are you not seventy-five years old?”

“How are _you_ here, Steve? Huh? If it can happen to you, it can happen to me, too.”

“No, it can’t. You’re…” Steve was about to say ‘normal’, but a dark flash in Bucky’s eyes—the lurking hurt that Rose and Sarah must have been talking about—reminded him of all he needed to guess at the answer. 

Bucky’s even-toned debrief to Peggy and Colonel Phillips about what the men had endured at Hydra’s hands. About what he had endured. Steve had been the only one who knew Bucky well enough to hear everything he was leaving out. It made sense now, especially looking at Bucky today, taller and broader in a very specific way that Steve knew all too well.

“They gave it to you. Zola and Schmidt. That’s how you survived the fall. You froze in the water below, just like me. Stayed there all this time.”

“Not exactly.” Bucky sighed and pushed Steve away. Quickly, he kept walking, with Steve trotting behind him.

They didn’t have far to go. After rounding a corner, Bucky pushed Steve with a strong finger at the small of his back, down a driveway, along the side of a clapboard-covered house, and into the garage behind it. 

“What are you talking about?” Steve asked, and then stopped short when he spotted the Packard, occupying pride of place in the garage.

Bucky had buffed and shined every piece of exposed metal, refinished the interior in brand-new leather, and painted the whole thing in the same sky blue and white of the model in the magazine ad they’d pinned to their bedroom wall.

The little that Steve knew about cars he’d learned from Bucky’s uncle back. He didn’t know much, but he knew that you did the aesthetic stuff last, after you’d triple checked that the thing would drive.

“You said it was still coming along. That it would be at least another few weeks.”

Bucky looked at the floor, and it was incredible how, even in an entirely new casing, almost nothing had changed. All the irritation he’d feigned at Steve’s arrival had disappeared completely, and he looked just as at peace to be with Steve as Steve felt. “It’s been ready to go for three weeks. But… I wanted to keep talking to you.”

“You didn’t need to… You could have told me. Come seen me. That’s better than talking.”

“I wasn’t only talking about Howard last night. You never know if… I’ve done things. I didn’t want you looking differently at me. Bucky… you might have been let down in what he’s become. But Jimmy… You liked him. Hell, _I_ liked him. I wanted to keep being that. Talking to you, it felt just like the kid promised. I could be whoever I wanted.”

Steve let out an exasperated noise somewhere between a groan and a snort. 

“You still can, Buck. And I’ll always want to keep talking to you. See you.”

He threw his arms around Bucky, who slowly, tentatively, began to hug him back, until they were squeezing hard enough to break something. One of Bucky’s arms hugged with a tightness that not even Steve could match. A memory of something Rose had said, about a fancy prosthetic, floated back to Steve’s mind. The PTSD episodes. “Jimmy”s admission to having been a prisoner of war echoed through Steve’s skull, threatening to drive him mad with anger. 

He pulled back, squeezing the arm. When he tried to feel under Bucky’s sleeve cuff, under the glove on his left hand, Bucky pulled back.

“Bucky. What happened to you? I have to know.”

“You first. It’s the only thing you haven’t told me. It’s the only thing I don’t know about you, though I have a pretty good guess.”

“I woke up a year ago in some sort of military-style lab dressed up to look like a hospital room,” Steve blurted out. “I ran away and ended up in Astoria. That’s what happened to me. That’s all I know. Now it’s your turn.”

Bucky sighed. “The people who were transporting me across Europe must have gotten attacked during the chaos a couple of years ago. I was left behind in a bunker. I woke up with some American college kid hovering over me. A hiker, of all things, who’d seen the entrance and gone exploring where he should have known not to. He said he knew me. Said I was his childhood hero. Said he knew it was probably crazy, but he had a good feeling about what he was doing.”

“What was he doing?” Steve asked.

“He set me free, gave me all the cash he had access to, and this.” Bucky reached into his back pocket for his wallet, and took out a baseball card with his face on it. “I’d forgotten my own name, but he gave it back to me. Told me this was who I was. Told me I was someone worth wanting to be, that I could be him again, or someone new, whatever I want. That’s all I want, Steve. Just let me enjoy the present, okay?”

Steve nodded. He could do that. Bucky had been helping him do the same for awhile now. There was one thing that couldn’t wait a minute longer, though.

“Did you mean it?” Steve asked. “What you said…”

“I’ve said a lot of crap over the past couple of months. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Last night. You said you had a feeling my friend felt the same way. Did…” 

“I gave you a pass before the war. I mean, your vision was so bad. It wasn’t your fault you couldn’t see this, too. But after, when you still didn’t get it… I thought it was only me who felt that way.”

“Your vision was always better than perfect, but your brains… They were always piss-poor. We balanced out.”

Bucky pursed his lips, but they still curved up into a smile. “Do you know, the first day I saw you here, I thought I had officially lost it. Had started seeing things. I followed you home, and you _seemed_ real. I called you mostly to talk myself out of it, to get the evidence that it was just an uncanny resemblance. But then… God, I barely held it together those first couple of times. Puked so hard afterwards.”

“This is romantic,” Steve complained.

“No,” Bucky said, with steely determination. “This is.”

He grabbed Steve’s head and kissed him. Kissed him so hard that Steve stumbled back against the car and had to reach behind him and hold the door handle for support. Kissed him so hard that Steve’s legs parted for better balance, wide enough to feel Bucky’s muscular thigh wedge between them. Kissed him so hard that their entire bodies practically melted into one another. Steve could feel Bucky’s arousal, and knew Bucky could feel his own. 

“I have a proposition for you,” he said once they’d come up for air and had finished panting for breath.

Bucky looked at him with one raised eyebrow. “I didn’t know you moved so fast.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. About how I need a mechanic with me on the trip. So, how about this? If you come with me, I won’t pester you to tell me what happened to you until we break down in Missouri.”

“You have a deal, but only if you let me drive. I don’t want you behind the wheel.”

Steve would have agreed to just about anything to keep Bucky with him. “Sure.”

Bucky smiled. “When do we leave?”

“The repairs were so cheap that I’ve saved up enough. We could leave tomorrow, if you want.”

“Why not today?”

“We need to let Luis take a spin first. It’s only right. And we have to pack.”

“I travel light. I can be ready in half an hour. I just need to let Koslovsky know. He can’t say anything. I bring in too much cash for him to fire me. Plus, he’s married to Rose’s niece.”

Steve laughed. “We should swing by her on our way to Queens. It’s only polite.”

“She’ll be heartbroken that I stole you from her.”

“Nah,” Steve said. “I have a feeling she’ll love it. There’s nothing better for gossip than a good jilting. Plus, she’s married.”


End file.
